Announcements regarding the course, including assignments, schedule and changes, will be published through the iCorsi system and the main course web page. Students are responsible for reading the course announcements.
Students are very much welcome and in fact encouraged to spontaneously stop by the instructor's and assitants' office, or to contact them on-line, to ask questions or discuss exercises and ideas. The instructor and the assistants will try their best to accommodate the students, but they might be unavailable for these extemporaneous meetings. Students may also reserve some time for a scheduled meeting by contacting the instructor and the assitants in advance.
There will be one midterm exam and one final exam. The course
grade will be a linear combination of the midterm exam and final exam.
In addition to that, the instructor can add or subtract up to 1 point,
for example based on course participation. In summary, the grade will
be computed as follows:
| +40% | midterm exam |
| +60% | final exam |
| ±10% | participation (instructor's discretionary evaluation) |
| -100% | plagiarism penalties (see below) |
Principle: Deadlines are firm.
Exceptions may be granted, only for documented medical conditions or other documented emergencies.
Penalties: late assignments will incur a penalty consisting of a reduction of the grade by one third of the value of the assignment per day. As a consequence, an assignment turned in more than two days late will be considered completely failed.
Principle: A student should never take someone else's material and present it as their own. Doing so means committing plagiarism.
The term "someone else" here refers any source, including fellow students or any other person, as well as on-line sources such as forums, search engines, aggregators, or automated systems.
The term "material" here refers to ideas, words, code, or any other piece of intellectual work, including suggestions and corrections regarding the student's own work.
Using someone else's material in homeworks and/or exams may be appropriate. For example, in creating software for a homework assignment, a student may want to use external libraries, programs, code fragments, or other external software artifacts. In every such case, whether the external material is used verbatim or with modifications, the student must always clearly identify the external material, and acknowledge its source. Failing to do so means committing plagiarism.
In any case in which external material is used by a student in homeworks and/or exams, the work will be evaluated based on the added value produced by that student.
Penalties: committing plagiarism on an assignment or an exam will result in failing that assignment or that exam. Each act of plagiarism will also result in a deduction of one or more points from the overall course grade, depending on the severity of the plagiarism. Penalties may be escalated in accordance with the regulations of the Faculty of Informatics.